But there’s a substantial body of literature showing that progress stalling out, especially for Mexican-Americans, between the second generation and the third. A 2002 study, for instance, reported that despite “improvements in human capital and earnings” for second-generation Mexican immigrants, the third generation still “trails the education and earnings of the average American,” and shows little sign of catching up. In their 2009 book “Generations of Exclusion,” the sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz found similar stagnation and slippage for descendants of Mexican immigrants during the second half of the 20th century.

[...]

But it’s pretty easy to see how the third-generation stall-out could continue, given the trends — unemployment, family breakdown, weakening communal ties — already working against social mobility in America.

These trends mean that we’re asking low-skilled immigrants to assimilate into a working class that’s already in crisis. We’re hoping that our dysfunctional educational system can prevent millions more children from assimilating downward into what sociologists have called a “rainbow underclass.” And we’re betting that the growing incomes of second-generation Hispanics will outweigh their retreat from marriage and rising out-of-wedlock birthrates.

[...]

On a blackboard in an economics classroom, the case for mass immigration looks airtight. But many of America’s economic difficulties are rooted in social and cultural problems, and a policy that just ignores those problems is a policy that’s likely to make them worse.

In the end, the promise of American life is more than just a bigger paycheck than foreign economies supply. It’s a promise of social equality, intergenerational advancement and fluid lines of class. The fact that so many people around the world still find that promise appealing is a wonderful thing. But it’s also important to be sure, while we decide how many of them to welcome and how fast, that we can still deliver on it.

As Libertyblog put it many years ago, the immigrants may destroy that to which they aspire. (Via Hot Air.)

Like Watergate, the Benghazi cover-up worked until the election, then fell apart:

At least four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers or are in the process of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress, Fox News has learned.

Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and Republican counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, is now representing one of the State Department employees. She told Fox News her client and some of the others, who consider themselves whistle-blowers, have been threatened by unnamed Obama administration officials.

“I'm not talking generally, I'm talking specifically about Benghazi – that people have been threatened,” Toensing said in an interview Monday. “And not just the State Department. People have been threatened at the CIA.”

Toensing declined to name her client. She also refused to say whether the individual was on the ground in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, when terrorist attacks on two U.S. installations in the Libyan city killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

However, Toensing disclosed that her client has pertinent information on all three time periods investigators consider relevant to the attacks: the months that led up to the attack, when pleas by the ambassador and his staff for enhanced security in Benghazi were mostly rejected by senior officers at the State Department; the eight-hour time frame in which the attacks unfolded, and the eight-day period that followed the attacks, when Obama administration officials incorrectly described them as the result of a spontaneous protest over a video.

The oh-so-left Pew Research Institute is giggly to tell us how much we’re now loved by Mexicans. And, by the way, a third of them are eager to move here and a fifth are prepared to do it illegally. That latter number is important because the people who are doing jobs Americans won’t do are about to be made Americans. (Via Drudge.)

We are no longer selling our enemies the rope with which we’ll be hanged, we’re giving it to them:

The Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, benefited from more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance — a bonanza ranging from cash and food stamps to Section 8 housing from 2002 to 2012, the Herald has learned.

First, that economists knew enough to moderate the business cycle, guaranteeing jobs for most people who wanted them ...

Second, that large corporations (think: General Motors, AT&T) were so dominant that they could provide secure jobs and generous benefits — health insurance, pensions — for much of the labor force ...

Third, that improvements in economic efficiency (a.k.a. “productivity”) would lift living standards and finance bigger government without steeper taxes ...

Fourth, that lifestyle choices — to marry, have children or divorce — would expand individual freedom without inflicting adverse social consequences ...

Weighed down by these contradictions, entitlement has been slowly crumbling for decades. The Great Recession merely applied the decisive blow. We’re not entitled to many things: not to a dynamic economy; not to secure jobs; not to homeownership; not to ever-more protective government; not to fixed tax burdens; not to a college education. Sooner or later, the programs called “entitlements,” including Social Security, will be trimmed because they’re expensive and some recipients are less deserving than others.

[...]

In the post-entitlement era, people’s expectations may be more grounded. But political conflicts — who gets, who gives — and social resentments will be, as they already are, sharper. Entitlement implied an almost-limitless future. Facing limits is a contentious exercise in making choices.